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About five nights ago I went out with a local friend to a traditional Okinawan club in Naha.

We were of course drinking 泡盛{あわもり} (awamori) with water and ice.

But the girl working there had a drink with us and poured in a bit of a can of coffee into her awamori.

Tonight I'm trying it myself in the guesthouse after asking the owner if it's a normal thing here and not just a peculiarity of that girl in the club.

He tells me it is popular in Okinawa and called コーヒー割{わ}り (kōhī-wari). Indeed I get Google hits and it seems the same is done with condensed milk in place of the coffee and/or 焼酎{しょうちゅう} (shochu) in place of the awamori.

None of the hits were in English or if they were don't provide much information. There's nothing in Wikipedia or WWWJDIC.

I don't understand why the name uses ～割り which seems to mean "split" or "divide"? This makes it sound like the coffee is "cut" or watered down with the spirits.

What am I missing? Could it be one of those Japanese abbreviations where half a word is missing?

Ah really!? I didn't think of that because when I've seen it the awamori is already diluted with water and the coffee makes it stronger in a secondary way. But maybe it's more common to add the coffee only without water also and I just haven't seen it done that way?
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hippietrailMar 30 '14 at 14:55

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Indeed it turns out that WWWJDIC does have an entry for 水割り: "(1) alcohol (usu. whiskey or shochu) diluted with water". So コーヒー割り literally means "diluted with coffee". That it's awamori may be implied but I'm not sure - maybe you have to say in full "泡盛のコーヒー割り".
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hippietrailMar 30 '14 at 15:09

Loaded with this new information I asked the guesthouse owner and apparently you can dilute awamori with coffee alone コーヒー割り or water alone 水割り, and it just so happens that the first time I saw somebody do it they actually used both water and coffee. TL;DR yes you are right (-:
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hippietrailMar 30 '14 at 15:00

Would this usage also be usable for, say, cleaning solutions? e.g. Pine-Solの水割り？ Hmmm...now I'm curious about how to express ratios...
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KajiMar 30 '14 at 15:45

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According to Wikipedia this seems to be for alcohol; 「水割とは、酒を飲料水で割ったもので、カクテルの一種。」 but I think you can use 割る as the verb for dilute 〜を水で割る。
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TimMar 30 '14 at 23:32

Interesting. Is this a regular construction? How should I parse it. Obviously コーヒー or 水 on the left is a noun, what POS would the 割り on the right be? What is the 割る to 割り process? ... Then the result is a noun phrases. Is this correct?
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hippietrailMar 31 '14 at 4:11

I see from Wikipedia that 割り would be the -i form, or 連用形 ren'yōkei. But it says "The i form has many uses, typically as a prefix." But it's not a prefix here and I can't see any use in that Wikipedia that I can connect to this use either ...
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hippietrailMar 31 '14 at 8:45

@hippietrail, sorry, late reply. As you've seen from the other question, 割り works as a noun, modified by コーヒー. But I think it makes some sense to call it a suffix as you do, since it's a bound morpheme (at least with this meaning), i.e. *割りを飲む doesn't work.
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dainichiApr 1 '14 at 12:50

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@hippietrail, just in case you hadn't noticed, 泡盛 (at least etymologically) follows the same pattern, 泡 means foam, 盛る means something along the lines of "heap up". So 泡盛 would be something like "heap of foam" (referring to something in the brewing process, Wikipedia tells me). I guess in this case there's no logical reason why it's not 盛り泡 "heaped up foam" instead.
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dainichiApr 2 '14 at 8:33

For ratios, 割{わり} is also used in other contexts to mean something like "10%", extending from the meaning of "split". So 十割そば are noodles that are 10 x 10% buckwheat, i.e. 100% buckwheat. 七割そば would be 70% buckwheat (the rest usually made up of wheat).